Since the launch of the new website the information here is now outdated.

Bounties are paid out according to the following:

5,000 XEM for a blog that is short and simple but acceptable to post.

10,000 XEM for a blog that has taken some serious work. These will be longer, talk about more serious topics, and probably would often have some graphics or screenshots involved.

20,000 XEM for a blog that goes above and beyond and is something we can consider excellent. These are the blogs that talk about the most difficult topics and have rich infographics and/or videos that accompanying them.

There will be a 5,000 XEM reward for blogs that are written by a community member and considered good enough to post, but the Core team has declined to post.

The best way to write a blog is in Markdown, which is the language used to write posts in the NEM forum and is easy to use, so if you have posted here, you have already written in Markdown.

Dillinger.io is a very good Markdown preview site. Please make sure your pics/infographics have proper hosting links on a third party hosting site. A guide for how to write in Markdown can be found here.

If you write and preview there, we can port it to the blog fairly easily. The best way to share with the NEM team so we can edit and comment is to then paste the code into a Google doc and share that.

Below are some following topics that are acceptable blog topics. But if you have any idea of your own, please message me as there is a wide variety of topics that can be covered.

New suggestions from the community are welcome too!

What is POI/Vesting

Ethereum/Bitcoin/NEM comparison.

on not claiming and more stakes, the history, and why it isn’t possible.

Blog about user Nelz’s “What is NEM? And all the companies around it,” infographic and explanation.

Relationship between NEM/Mijin/Catapult

There has been some buzz recently amidst the announcement of an alliance between NEM and Mijin leading users and developers to ask what does this mean for the future of NEM.

NEM is an advanced, bitcoin 2.0+ system that has been in development since January of 2014. NEM is not just a crypto currency. Above that, and more importantly, NEM is a peer to peer platform and it provides services like payments, messaging, asset making, and namespace system.

While NEM is an open source project, and a public blockchain platform, Mijin is a private blockchain product that has been developed by the 3 core developers of NEM along with Tech Bureau since the fall of 2015.

Mijin

Public blockchains, like Bitcoin or NEM, allow anyone to join and set up a node to share and receive data. However, many real-world business and financial uses require that those who can participate in a blockchain be restricted; these are called permissioned blockchains and Mijin provides this powerful functionality.

Mijin has been proven that it can be applied for bank ledger systems in April 2016 by a third party test initiated by a major Japanese bank through Dragonfly Fintech, which uses Mijin at its core.

Mijin and NEM work hand in hand, not only to maintain a common API specification, but also to create a new ecosystem as a fusion of the Tech Bureau commercial entity and the NEM open source project.
Tech Bureau has announced that it shall contribute the commercial version of Mijin as an open-source product in summer 2016, with a dual-licensing scheme. The official launch date has yet to be confirmed.

Catapult

The project codenamed, “Catapult”, is a newly amended and augmented version of the current Mijin platform that Tech Bureau has developed previously with the NEM core developers.
With this architecture, Mijin and NEM shall be creating yet another first in the crypto-sphere. Catapult will mark the beginning of an enterprise class approach. It will create a new standard of design and is unprecedented in the blockchain domain, lifting its bar.

Catapult will be the entire architecture re-worked and migrated from Java to C++ to aid in increasing performance and will be switching from http protocol to socket communication which will help reduce latency and improve bi-directional communication.
It is a high-performance product that can handle high transaction throughputs, such as 4 digits per second, even on a geographically dispersed network.

Catapult has been under development since the first quarter of 2016 in stealth mode. Tech Bureau said that it is committed to the open source project of NEM and will contribute this code base into the NEM open source project

Tech Bureau CEO, Takao Asayama has said:

“It’s an unprecedented and big challenge for us all to develop products in a more efficient way than ever by fusing a commercial entity and an open source community into one, without conflict, and without interfering the very existence of an open source initiative. However, once the ball gets rolling, future versions of Mijin and NEM will be historical outcomes of this totally new ecosystem.”